Canada’s first Chinese print shop still operating on East Georgia (with video)

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VANCOUVER -- A century ago, Lam Lat Tong left his job as a railway cook to start a rubber stamp shop in Vancouver.

Against all odds, the Ho Sun Hing Printing company is still operating. This makes it one of the few local businesses to survive throughout the 100 year history of The Vancouver Sun, so we decided to pay a visit.

It doesn’t disappoint. Step inside its lovely Art Deco building at 259 East Georgia and you feel like you’re back in 1910 yourself.

Everywhere you look, there are antique printing presses, banks of old-style lead type and stacks of the menus, letterhead and wedding invitations the company has been churning out for decades.

Quality has been the secret to the success of the company, which is still owned and operated by Lam’s family. The Wo Fat bakery has been gone for decades, but a box for Wo Fat’s legendary bean cakes looks like it’s still fresh off the press.

Most of the printing is done by third generation Lams such as Stephen and Peter, but the office remains the domain of the family matriarch, Hilda.

Not for much longer, though. At 79, Hilda is looking to retire, and the family is slowly winding the company down, selling off its presses, furniture and odds and ends.

“That’s what we used to do a lot of, that high-end work. Nobody does that [any more], nobody wants to pay that kind of money. Things that we used to do are now done on computers.”

A couple of tables have been topped with examples of lead type a visitor can pick up for a few dollars apiece. There are also boxes filled with old designs and logos etched into brass, wood or vinyl stamps. The stamps are intricate and delightful, ranging from Buddhas to camels and mermaids.

I pick up a stamp with backward letters and puzzle over what it says.

“Ukrainian cabbage rolls,” interprets Stephen. “You get used to [reading backwards] after awhile.”

Some of the old presses defy belief. Each comes with a dizzying array of wheels, levers and gears, and collectively they probably pack enough steel to rebuild the Titanic.

Some of the machines are covered in decades of dust, but most are still in running order, ready to be fired up. In fact, a new wave of boutique vintage printing companies in the States have been buying up the company’s old presses.

“People from San Francisco and Los Angeles are interested in this machine,” says Stephen, running his hand along a 1912 Lanston monotype, which is used to produce lead type.

“This is a really old one, a really rare machine. But it’s just sitting here now, we don’t need to use it any more. We last used it 20, 30 years ago.”

This particular Lanston monotype has been modified to do both English and Chinese characters, which makes it unique. At the back of the shop you can find an example of its work: a complete set of Chinese type, with 8,000 characters.

“This is only one style of Chinese type,” he notes.

“If you wanted five styles of type, then you had [to make] 8,000 characters for each style. If you wanted the type a little smaller, you had to do 8,000 characters of smaller type.”

Lead type went out of vogue in the ’70s, but not at Ho Sun Hing, where nothing ever seems to have been thrown out. They still do menus and letterhead with lead type on a Chandler & Price Platen Press.

“This was the workhorse,” Stephen states, patting an ancient machine. “People would change their prices every year or so and you’d print the menus on this.

“Here’s a more modern one,” he adds, pointing to another model. “We still do a lot of work with it. We converted this machine to hand from automatic. This is 1930s, this machine. The other one is way, way earlier, maybe early 1900s.”

Which means the elder platen press dates to the Lam Lat Tong era, a century back. Family lore has it the company was founded around 1910, a decade after he left Kwangtung province in China for British Columbia.

Chinese immigrants after 1885 had to pay a head tax to immigrate to Canada, which meant both Lam Lat Tong and his son Fong Lam paid it. (In China, the family name comes first, in Canada it was flipped around.) Hilda still has the head tax certificate of Fong, her late husband, who paid $500 after he arrived in Canada on Jan. 15, 1920 aboard the Canadian Pacific Ocean liner Empress of Russia.

Nine decades later, Hilda received an official apology and $20,000 from the federal government as reparation for the racist tax. Asked how she feels about the apology, she smiles and says “Well, we got the $20,000 back. [But] at that time, $500 to the head tax is a lot of money. It was all borrowed, too. Every time they earned anything, they [had to send] everything back.”

Chinatown was a society unto itself for much of the 20th century. Hilda was born and raised in Vancouver, but has an accent because she rarely spoke English growing up in Chinatown, aside from when she attended Strathcona school.

“We used to live in a little shack on Keefer street, on the lane, when I was first born, before we moved to 315 East Georgia,” she recalls.

“That little shack didn’t have anything. The toilet was outdoors, in the lane. That’s when we were poor, I guess.”

The first directory listing for the company was in 1918, when it was Ho Sun Hing Rubber Stamps. But it could well have been operating earlier, because many directory listings of the time simply say “Chinese.”

The company’s first location was at 205 East Pender, near Main. There is a cabinet photo of a proud Lam Lat Tong posing in front of his business alongside the neighbours who ran Lee’s Jewelry and Optical.

In 1920 the company moved to 438 Main, and two years after that relocated to 258 ½ East Pender, where it operated until the company moved to its present location in 1963.

“We rented the [other] place,” explains Hilda.

“It was in the basement, and we had to do electrical stuff there, so we said ‘Why don’t we buy a place and move?’ We paid a little over $20,000 [for 259 East Georgia], but we had a to put a lot of stuff in ... electrical, everything. This used to be HY Louie Cash and Carry before us.”

Lam Lat Tong founded the business, but Fong Lam was the one that made it a Chinatown staple. He was also active in several Chinese benevolent associations and Chinese Nationalist political organizations – he was on the Central Committee of the Chinese Nationalist Party of the Republic of China (the Kuomintang, which Mao Zedong defeated in 1949 to make China a communist country). A portrait of Chinese Nationalist party leader Chiang Kai-shek still hangs upstairs, two decades after Fong Lam died.

Chinatown boomed in the ’50s and ’60s, with restaurants and nightclubs along Pender and Main and wholesalers on Keefer and Georgia. There are filing cabinets full of the letterhead and menus the company used to produce for customers like the Smilin’ Buddha cabaret (where Jimi Hendrix played as a teenager), The Shanghai Junk (the bar where Cheech and Chong started) and the Ho Inn (the Lams’ favourite restaurant, back in the day).

Ho Sun Hing was the first Chinese print shop in Canada, and the company did work all across the country. It also did a lot of work for English-speaking customers, including The Vancouver Sun.

“You should have come a couple of weeks earlier,” laughed Stephen.

“You should see all the Sun and Province [newspaper carrier] bags we had here. We just sold the plates to an artist, he just grabbed it and took off.”

Some of Ho Sun Hing’s presses were purchased from the Sun and Province when the papers got out of hot lead type. Now Ho Sun Hing is slowly melting its lead type for recycling. 0“It’s 40 cents a pound now,” says Stephen.

There are other treasures in the two-storey, 6,000-square-foot building. Industrial wooden tables with the patina of a century of heavy use. A drop-front desk that’s made out of fir, which makes it locally made. Some very old black velvet paintings that used to decorate the living quarters upstairs.

What will become of the building if the print shop closes? It dates to 1909 but has no heritage protection, so it could be knocked down for condos — the city has rezoned “Chinatown south” for residential buildings that go up to 12 storeys. (Both of Hilda’s childhood homes were razed in urban renewal schemes in the 1960s, and the company’s first two locations have also been demolished.)

On the other hand, it’s a beautiful building, the only one of its kind in the city. If you moved all the printing presses out, you’d essentially have a concrete shell with high ceilings, which could make a great restaurant or bar.

“[Chinatown is] losing a lot of its heritage, that’s for sure,” says Stephen.

“But you know what, the artists and people who come and live here want to keep that [heritage], you can see that. It’ll be almost like Yaletown — it’s changing, but with a lot of heritage in it.

“Half and half, people who like the old stuff, they like the history here, and also the new stuff.”

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I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.